Taking a quick tally of where some of my favourite US blogs stack up on the Russian / Georgian conflict, there are some interesting perspectives. Steve Clemons at the Washington Note is in forceful mood:
The U.S. has displayed a reckless disregard for Russian interests for some time. I don’t like Russia’s swing to greater domestic authoritarianism and worry about its stiffened posture on a number of international fronts — but [Nixon Center President Dimitri] Simes convinces me in his important Foreign Affairs essay, “Losing Russia,” that much of what we are seeing unfold between Russia and Georgia involves a high quotient of American culpability.
When Kosovo declared independence and the US and other European states recognized it — thus sidestepping Russia’s veto in the United Nations Security Council — many of us believed that the price for Russian cooperation in other major global problems just went much higher and that the chance of a clash over Georgia’s breakaway border provinces increased dramatically…
At the time, there was word from senior level sources that Russia had asked the US to stretch an independence process for Kosovo over a longer stretch of time — and tie to it some process of independence for the two autonomous Georgia provinces. In exchange, Russia would not veto the creation of a new state of Kosovo at the Security Council. The U.S. rejected Russia’s secret entreaties and instead rushed recognition of Kosovo and said damn the consequences.
Now thousands are dead. The fact is that a combination of American recklessness, serious miscalculation and over-reach by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, as well as Russia’s forceful reassertion of its regional national interests and status as an oil and gas rich, tough international player means America and Europe have yet again helped generate a crisis that tests US global credibility.
Greg Djerejian – making a welcome return to regular posting on his site the Belgravia Dispatch – more or less agrees:
First, let us disabuse ourselves from the notion that Mr. Saakashvili is some glorious democrat (the election he barely won in January included irregularities, and there continues to be endemic corruption in Tblisi).
Second, let us recall that many south Ossetians and Abkhazians are not particularly keen to live under Tbilisi’s yoke, indeed some prefer Russian influence to predominate there for the time being.
Third, if there is any truth to Russian allegations that there are some 1,500 fatalities in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali–and they were caused by a major initial over-reach by the Georgian military (we will need to wait for more details to emerge)–expect many more brutish bombardments like the Russians apparently have conducted in the Georgian town of Gori, alas.
Fourth, some context: ever since the overly hasty recognition of Kosovo went live, Putin has been very keen to intimate what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, having personally threatened Saakashvili that Russia would formally recognize as independent states Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Meanwhile, Ben Smith at Politico notes that the sudden outbreak of conflict presented McCain and Obama with “a true ‘3am moment'”, and furthermore that “their responses to the crisis suggested dramatic differences in how each candidate, as president, would lead America in moments of international crisis”:
Obama’s statement put him in line with the White House, the European Union, NATO and a series of European powers, while McCain’s initial statement – which he delivered in Iowa and ran on a blog on his Web site under the title “McCain Statement on Russian Invasion of Georgia” – put him more closely in line with the moral clarity and American exceptionalism projected by President Bush’s first term.
A McCain adviser suggested that Obama’s statement constituted appeasement, while Obama’s camp suggested that McCain was being needlessly belligerent and dangerously quick to judge a complicated situation.
Finally, lots of praise all over for James Traub’s excellent backgrounder in yesterday’s New York Times, which provides a wealth of historical context. One angle that jumped out was the pipeline politics dimension (about which I blogged on Friday):
Marshall Goldman, a leading Russia scholar, argues in a recent book that Mr. Putin has established a “petrostate,” in which oil and gas are strategically deployed as punishments, rewards and threats. The author details the lengths to which Mr. Putin has gone to retain control over the delivery of natural gas from Central Asia to the West. A proposed alternative pipeline would skirt Russia and run through Georgia, as an oil pipeline [i.e. the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline] now does. “If Georgia collapses in turmoil,” Mr. Goldman notes, “investors will not put up the money for a bypass pipeline.”
In an age when media coverage is such a significant dimension of armed conflict, the question of who’s cast as the goodie and who’s the baddie is not a small one. So who’s winning the narrative high ground over South Ossetia?
Until the fighting began, the answer – in western Europe and the US, at least – would clearly have been Georgia. Look at the regular stories over the past few months of Russian sabre-rattling towards Georgia, including YouTube footage that seems to show Russian fighters downing a Georgian UAV.
Those stories dovetailed perfectly with a growing mood of suspicion towards Russia on many fronts; as Jules’s post on Friday observed, the image of Russian tanks rolling in to South Ossetia immediately prompted “dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin”.
But a couple of pieces of commentary over the weekend suggest a growing backlash against Mikheil Saakashvili among the centre left European commentariat. In Saturday’s Guardian, Mark Almond tersely dismisses the idea of “plucky little Georgia” standing up to the Russian leviathan: “the cold war reading won’t wash”, he says. Instead, he argues, the conflict in South Ossetia
…has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain’s widely unexpected military response with the comment: “No great power retreats for ever.” Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev …
Anyone familiar with the Caucasus knows that the state bleating about its victim status at the hands of a bigger neighbour can be just as nasty to its smaller subjects. Small nationalisms are rarely sweet-natured …
Thomas de Waal, writing in today’s Observer, agrees. While Russia is behaving badly, he says, the same’s true of Georgia too:
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seems to care less about [South Ossetians] than about asserting that they live in Georgian territory. Otherwise he would not on the night of 7-8 August have launched a massive artillery assault on the town of Tskhinvali, which has no purely military targets and whose residents, the Georgians say, lest we forget, are their own citizens. This is a blatant breach of international humanitarian law …
Saakashvili is a famously volatile risk-taker, veering between warmonger and peacemaker, democrat and autocrat. On several occasions international officials have pulled him back from the brink. On a visit to Washington in 2004, he received a tongue-lashing from then Secretary of State Colin Powell who told him to act with restraint. Two months ago, he could have triggered a war with his other breakaway province of Abkhazia by calling for the expulsion of Russian peacekeepers from there, but European diplomats persuaded him to step back. This time he has yielded to provocation and stepped over the precipice.
The provocation is real, but the Georgian President is rash to believe this is a war he can win or that the West wants it. Both George Bush and John McCain have visited Georgia, made glowing speeches praising Saakashvili and were rewarded with the Order of St George. But Bush, at least in public, is now bound to be cautious, calling for a ceasefire.
The reaction in much of Europe will be much less forgiving. Even before this crisis, a number of governments, notably France and Germany, were reporting ‘Georgia fatigue’. Though they broadly wished the Saakashvili government well, they did not buy the line that he was a model democrat – the sight last November of his riot police tear-gassing protesters in Tbilisi and smashing up an opposition TV station dispelled that illusion. And they have a long agenda of issues with Russia, which they regard as more important than the post-Soviet quarrel between Moscow and Tbilisi. Paris and Berlin will now say they were right to urge caution on Georgia’s Nato ambitions at the Bucharest Nato summit.
Pretty amazing pictures from Georgia, where the Russian tanks are on the roll again, prompting dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin…
This all for a separatist province with a population of….60,000. That’s about the same as Guildford.
I was wondering, if Russia invades South Ossetia, as it has, if that is technically an act of war – it’s a separatist province, after all, that denies it is part of Georgian territory, so it’s debatable whether this is an infringement of Georgian territory. But then Putin helpfully clarified matters. ‘War has started’, he said. Good, glad we got that cleared up.
The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, has been on CNN begging for American assistance. “It’s not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values,” he said. John McCain would no doubt agree, but I’m not sure the American people are that keen to leap to Georgia’s defence, though no doubt the headline ‘Russia invades Georgia’ will alarm some of the hicks down south… ‘Git mah gun, John Boy, the Russkies will be headin’ for Alabama next!’.
Meanwhile George Bush is busy watching the Olympics in Beijing, and is only likely to get really agitated if the Russian tanks roll down the main motorway in Tblisi, which is named after him. Russian tanks on George Bush highway, that would be something.
It’s notable that Saakashvili didn’t even mention the EU. This is, after all, the first war on European soil since the Yugoslav War of the 1990s. A decade on, and the EU is still nowhere near being able to police its own backyard.
In July, I argued that the African Union’s discomfort with the indictment of Sudan’s President Bashir might be a turning-point in the evolution of international law. “African leaders are setting limits on global governance,” said I, because they are sick/scared of being in a “laboratory for international institutions”. Since then, there’s been a pitched battle between the AU and the West over Bashir, with the US abstaining on the resolution extending the UN mandate in Darfur in anger, and the AU condemning the ICC for deciding “to put oil on the fire” yesterday.
But now there’s a new front opening up. Rwanda has just published a detailed report accusing France of complicity in the 1994 genocide, pointing fingers at Mitterand, de Villepin and other former Gallic high-ups. That comes less than a month after Rwanda threatened to pull its troops out of Darfur when a Spanish judge accused their general of involvement in revenge killings after the genocide. French prosecutors have also been going after members of the Rwandan government, up to and including President Paul Kagame, on similar charges – the AU has, unsurprisingly, come out in favor of the Rwandans against this.
Where on earth is this all going? Check out an interview Kagame gave to the FT in early July, when the latest report was in the works. Edited highlights:
Q: So it will name names?
PK: Yes. And hopefully our judges will enjoy indicting some of those people. There is no justice for Europe and justice for Africa that are different. And if they are to be different it cannot just be Europe extending its jurisdiction into other countries Africa if it is to be universal.
Q: So you will launch some indictments on the basis of the report?
PK: I don’t rule that out unless there is progress on these issues.
Q: To an outsider it seems like the political tensions between Rwanda and France are being exercised through the legal system?
PK:Legal systems are systems of government. No one will believe the French when they say it is the judge we are not concerned. Judges don’t make laws they only carry out their duties based on the laws of the country. There are problems relating to that between us and France and Spain. And probably there would be problems between us and any other country that would want to come up with this. First of all there is no basis in terms of fact and no basis in terms of process. It is hugely questionable what is meant by universal jurisdiction when it comes to basing things on their own law and extending it to other territories. One would have expected there to be an international regulatory mechanism, otherwise you will not avoid chaos. Everyone will be indicting everyone else.
That certainly seems to be an option. Of course, there are multitudinous differences between an ICC indictment (as on Darfur) and national courts claiming universal jurisdiction (as on Rwanda). Nonetheless, the convergence of these tensions – specifically the way they all seem to get tangled up in the Darfur peace operation and AU-Western relations – rather disrupts the legal niceties. Does this mean that promoting the rule of law is about to join democratization as an unacceptable foreign policy goal for Western governments? Not quite: the once and (I rather suspect) future Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power argues in the current NYRB that Barack should effectively launch a “Presidency of the Law”:
In his National Security Strategy for 2002, Bush used the words “liberty” eleven times, “freedom” forty-six times, and “dignity” nine times; yet people who live under oppression around the world have seen few benefits from President Bush’s freedom doctrine. Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under Bush, put it best when he said, “Since 9/11 our principal export to the world has been our fear.” The gulf between America’s rights rhetoric and the abuses carried out against detainees in American custody has been fatal to American credibility. Obama needs to restore that credibility by ending those excesses, and by following through on his pledge to launch a foreign aid initiative rooted in Franklin Roosevelt’s core democratic value: freedom from fear. The United States should invest in a long-term “rule of law” initiative that takes up the burden of helping other countries and international organizations to build workable legal systems in the developing world.
Be careful what you wish for. The task may not be building legal systems, but reconciling them. Or reconciling the various leaders indicted by them…
Thomas Schweich, previously the Bush administration’s Afghan drugs “czar” has made a big splash in the New York Times by claiming that President Hamid Karzai supports the drugs trade and that aerial eradication of the crop is the only way ahead:
An odd cabal of timorous Europeans, myopic media outlets, corrupt Afghans, blinkered Pentagon officers, politically motivated Democrats and the Taliban were preventing the implementation of an effective counterdrug program. And the rest of us could not turn them around.
Juicy stuff, no doubt. But Schweich has been challenged before, including by Barnett Rubin, a well-known Afghan expert.
Schweich’s argument seems to hinge on a central proposition: that insurgency, not poverty drives opium cultivation. But as a CN expert David Mansfield argues, this assertion is based on “the finding that households in these [poppy-growing] provinces reported higher average annual incomes ($3,316 for poppy-growing and $2,480 for others) to UNODC surveyors than those in the north ($2,690 for poppy-growing and $1,851 for others) or centre ($1,897 for poppy-growing and $1,487 for others).” He has further criticized the UN’s lack of reporting of sample size and statistical significance – both of which are necessary to determine the accuracy of the conclusion that poverty is not a factor.
In others word, the basis to argue that poverty does not drive opium-cultivation is weak. The link between opium and insurgency is also not as direct as Schweich imagines.
True, opium cultivation and insurgent violence are correlated geographically, and opium now provides the insurgents with a portion of their revenues. True, this portion may have increased as NATO pursues a decapitation strategy, trying to kill high-level insurgents. But the Taliban, al-Qaida and the other insurgent groups have many sources of revenue; and while a correlation exists between instability and opium cultivation, the causality derives from insecurity, not the other way around.
Why is is not possible to conduct aerial spraying then, as Schweich suggests? Simple. Afghan farmers do not use chemicals, so aerial eradication will likely be blamed as the cause of disease, premature deaths or crop destruction, which is a regular but unrelated occurrence in Afghanistan, as in any developing country. The Afghan government, already mistrusted, would suffer from any backlash.
